Associació Plataforma per la Llengua – Collectiu l’Esbarzer
Thank you Distinguished Chair, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,
We believe that addressing hate speech, both online and offline, must form a part of any
serious strategy to promote peaceful coexistence in peaceful societies. Institutional
[inaudible] platforms and civil society must work together to ensure that neither physical nor
digital environments reproduce or exacerbate structural discrimination. For minoritized
language communities, public spaces and online platforms should be venues for
participation, expression, and intercultural dialogue. Instead, linguistic diversity often
becomes a target. Catalan speakers, like many other minority language communities,
regularly face harassment, insults, and hate speech for using their own languages in
everyday interactions and on social media. These attacks do not occur in isolation, they
reinforce longstanding prejudice, delegitimize our identities and create a climate of fear that
discourages people from using their languages openly. To address this, states and platforms
should recognize language-based hate as a form of discrimination, ensure that reporting,
monitoring, and moderation systems understand and protect minorities languages, and
support initiatives that empower communities to use their languages safely and
comfortably, both in public life and on digital platforms. We therefore encourage the United
Nations and its member states to integrate linguistic rights into a broader framework for
social cohesion, both offline and online. Protecting minority languages is a key step towards
more inclusive, safer, and more peaceful societies. Thank you.